Context
This interview was conducted shortly after Jopling opened White Cube and gives a history of his development as a gallerist. Jopling went on to represent two artists of an older generation; Anthony Gormley and Mona Hatoum (both Turner prize nominees in 95). The assertion Jopling makes within the text that he is interested in an art that is "timeless" is an interesting one and serves the argument of those skeptical of the young British art that the it was not as radical as one would at first suppose.
However it would be naive in the extreme to conclude that the agendas and aims of the artists and gallerists were concurrent.
Note SR: 1996

Jay Jopling (JJ) represents five artists: Damien Hirst, Ita Doron, Marc Quinn,
Marcus Taylor and Gavin Turk. All have shown in spaces outside the usual
white gallery. Last year Jopling opened White Cube, an exhibition space
which also serves as the nerve centre and catalyst for a series of out of
gallery exhibitions and other projects.

e: Before the first show you did with Marc Quinn in 1988 you were dealing in
the minimalist market, with works by artists such as Donald Judd and Dan
Flavin. How did you move toward working with artists who were younger?

JJ: It had always been my intention to work with artists of my own
generation. Whilst at University in Edinburgh, I gained a huge
understanding of how the art world works by putting together a project
called "New Art - New World", a project in which I invited a number of
international artists to submit works for auction to charity on the theme
of "New Beginnings".
I went to America for the first time and got works from Schnabel,
Oldenburg, Haring and Basquiat to name just a few. The idea was to go for
established artists and thereby raise as much money as possible, which was
successful as the project raised about half a million dollars for the Save
The Children Fund and the money, I know, was very well spent in Somalia,
Sudan and Ethiopia.
Through meeting those artists and getting a feeling for how the art market
operates in America, I realised that in order to work with artists of my
own generation I would first have to make some money.
Most of the young artists whose work appealed to me was very ambitious in
scale and intention and consequently the fabrication fees were not small.
In order to make the necessary money, I began dealing in American Minimal
Art - a period of recent art history which particularly interested me and
which, at the time, I considered to be under established in the market.

e: What year are we talking about?

JJ: 1986, when the art market was becoming very strong and it was
possible, if one kept one's head, to make a little bit of money.
Fortunately for me I didn't get involved in borrowing money. I was meeting
people and locating various key works when I was contacted by specialist
collectors. The money I made from this dealing enabled me to put on the
show of Marc Quinn's in Docklands in 1988. He was the first artist I
started working with.

e: This was, of course, a long time before Self (the Blood Head). What sort
of work did he produce for that show?

JJ:: He was using bread dough as a medium - making sculptures which,
when complete, resembled expressionistic sculptures, but which, in fact
denied the whole process of expressionism. The actual form of the
finished piece was completed by the accidental process of the oven. His
own involvement in the final form of the sculpture was non-existent - which
interested him a lot.
Those ideas evolved - when I first showed Self (at Grob gallery), it was
exhibited along with May to September 1991 - a wall of about five hundred
hands made of bread, each one bearing the incised lines etched from his
own palm. It was a logical extension of those ideas of the automatic
sculptures - combining with the use of himself as the principle subject
for his work.

e: There is also this idea of mutability which occurs in Damien Hirst's
work - things being suspended from decay or having a propensity to decay.

JJ: Yes, the Blood Head is a very fragile sculpture and requires quite
a degree of commitment on the part of the collector. That sculpture in a
very clear way expresses the fragility between life and death; the
sculptural form of Self (literally, its sculptural life) would be non-
existent if one were to pull the plug out. A lot of people are horrified by
the idea of it but when one is confronted by that sculpture they see it is
remarkably calm .... almost serene. The eyes are closed; the mouth slightly
open. I think it's a very significant work of art.

e: You later started to work with Damien Hirst, was this around the time of
those two shows, Modern Medicine and Freeze?

JJ: I met Damian after those shows which I thought were particularly
impressive. He was someone who recognised the tremendous energy among his
contemporaries at Goldsmiths at that time and it was very much his
initiative that got those shows off the ground. Freeze was very much his
own project and then he worked with Carl Freedman and Billee Sallmann on
Modern Medicine and a show called Gambler.
Any one who saw those projects realise how professionally they were
organised and to a large extent that is something which has continued in
London, and thank goodness, because there are very few people who are able
to put on exhibitions for what is essentially the most creatively vibrant
city anywhere in the world at the moment.

e: A lot of Londoners wouldn't know it. The press for instance still seems
to perceive the health of art in Britain as directly parallel to the health
of Cork Street.

JJ: This has always been one of the problems. The national press in
Britain are incredibly narrow-minded when it comes to contemporary art.
Arts editors particularly - even if there is an art critic who might be
supportive or open-minded to recent developments like Sarah Kent or Richard
Dorment, most tend to be very disparaging about the so called avant garde.
You only have to look at the more adventurous exhibitions such as Gravity
and Grace which was dealing with key ideas which artists of today have
really latched on to - the amount of young people who went to see that show
was staggering; there were record attendance figures, yet this was in no
way commensurate with the reviews that show got - it received appalling
notices.

e: The larger London galleries, the Hayward with Gravity and Grace, the
Serpentine with the Gordon Matta Clark show for instance, seem to be
attempting to make a cultural link between what is going on today and the
concerns of the past, and artists also seem to be marrying up with those
ideas.

JJ: I think the directors of both those galleries, Julia Peyton-Jones
and Andrea Schlieker at the Serpentine, Henry Meyric Hughes and Greg Hilty
at the Hayward as well as Emma Dexter at the ICA are doing an excellent
job in trying to give due regard to the influences which are relevant
today.

e: Looking back at British art in the 1980s I get this image of loads of
heroic Scotsmen striking heroic poses in their pictures and one could say
that so far in the 90s we've seen a lot of artists who have received a
certain prominence as heroic Duchampians. There is that thing in the work
we've discussed and also in Gavin Turk's work - the idea of the artist
playing, in an ironic way, with that idea of heroism.
You've said elsewhere that you believe that you would want to represent
work which would be relevant in thirty or forty years time - so could you
outline for me the values which you think will ensure the works' survival?

JJ: Firstly, the idea of artist as hero doesn't interest me at all.
I'm interested much more in the fact that a great piece of art can
transcend various ephemeral, cultural situations.
To give you a clearer idea , I'm not at all interested in issue-based art;
for an issue-based idea would have to be pretty extraordinary to stand out
beyond the relevance of that particular issue. I'm interested in art which
has a certain degree of universality and is able to transcend certain
cultural and generational differences.

e: Can you tell me about the function of this space (White Cube) in relation
to the rest of your programme.

JJ: Prior to working here I worked from my home in Brixton, which
would serve as a meeting place for artists and collectors, and at an
office there we would organise two to three exhibitions per year in
independent spaces. These spaces were chosen for their relevance to a
particular body of work, for instance we showed Marcus Taylor sculptures
in a disused printing factory in Farringdon, Itai Doron's show was in a
three roomed warehouse the size of a football field in Docklands. I
continue that programme and recognise the restrictions of the typical
commercialgallery space on artists - not just in terms of the scale but
also by the very fact that most "gallery artists" have to exhibit in the
same space every year or every eighteen months. I needed to get a place in
the centre of town; White Cube represents the complete antithesis to our
out-of-gallery exhibition programme, which is in many ways the more
significant aspect of what we do. White Cube acts as a catalyst for other
projects. We also have an office from which Julia Royce and I work and
from which we can hopefully sell work.

e: There seems to be a lot more interest from galleries such as the Lisson
and Saatchi in the work shown in artist run spaces. I wonder if you have
any views on the implications of all this?

JJ: Independent spaces are in many ways the most exciting spaces in
which to show art and I don't think it's any coincidence that important
collectors are buying work from these exhibitions. There simply aren't
the facilities here in London - there are too few galleries adventurous
enough to support the extraordinary number of talented artists in this
city. We are indeed fortunate that artists collaborate to put on
exhibitions off their own bat - Cubitt Street and City Racing are
fantastic examples of a process which works very successfully, I've seen
some wonderful shows at both these locations.

e: Could we talk about the financial arrangements you have with your artists?

JJ: Every artist has a different requirement - I think one of the
greatest mistakes an artist or a dealer can make is to have preconceptions
- it's important to be as flexible as possible. The most important decision
I make is the decision as to which artist I want to work with, and having
made that decision I try to be as amenable to the requirements of the
artists as possible.
Most artists and dealers work on a 50-50 basis financially and that is
basically the standard which applies here.

e: Do you make many sales to British collectors?

JJ: Contemporary art has a much stronger following throughout Europe -
that is reflected in sales. Maybe 70-80% of the art I sell goes abroad,
which is sad. As there are so few young, British collectors there will be
a dearth of art works which might later be donated museums. So it is the
public institutions which will eventually lose out.